Russia draws UN Security Council attention to mass grave found near Donetsk

September 30, 2014, 18:57 UTC+3UNITED NATIONSAccording to Russia’s UN envoy Vitaly Churkin, the available information allows for speculating that these civilians were shot in cold blood by Ukrainian troops

UN Security Council

UNITED NATIONS, September 30. /ITAR-TASS/. Russia has drawn the attention of UN Security Council to the mass grave found near Donetsk on September 23.

“It is nakedly clear that those people fell victim to reprisals, of which their hands tied behind the back, bullet wounds in the head and spent 9-mm cartridges found at the site are evidence,” Russia’s UN envoy Vitaly Churkin said in a message addressed to the UN SC.

According to Churkin’s message published on the UN electronic system of documents, “the available information allows for speculating that these civilians were shot in cold blood by Ukrainian troops.”

“There have been reports that two days before the mass grave was discovered the area had been vacated by a unit of the 25th airborne brigade of the Ukrainian army and the Aidar battalion, who had controlled the area for a long time,” Churkin said.

He drew attention to the fact that the discovered grave was registered by members of the special OSCE monitoring mission in Ukraine and the corresponding information was included in the daily report of that mission on September 23.”

Last Monday, the first deputy prime minister of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, Andrei Purgin, told ITAR-TASS that another mass grave has been found near the village of Nizhnyaya Krynka, where a Ukrainian National Guard battalion had its base two weeks ago.

One of the graves contained some 40 bodies of civilians, while the two others had the bodies of captured militia members and Ukrainian soldiers, the prime minister of theself-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, Alexander Zakharchenko, said last week.

Russian lawmaker, Olga Kazakova on Tuesday at a session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) said that PACE should not remain indifferent to the recent fact of discovered mass burial of people subjected to torture in Ukraine’s Donetsk region.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry believes the mass burial of civilians near Donetsk is a military crime, and insists on an urgent and comprehensive international probe into the case.